In Restless Human Hearts (1875), after their trial marriage and disappointing continental trip, Neville and Georgiana are reflecting separately on the concern they feel about their future: Georgie wants the ‘transports of love’ she and Neville had at the beginning of their relationship, while Neville requires something else. “I think,” said Neville, speaking in a […]
Reading a few books for the first time, but mostly re-reading with new eyes what’s been on my shelves for many years, I’ve been struck by the drift of Jefferies’ way of putting things together, his cast of mind, notably his way of making contrasts between this & that: in essays, reportage and novels (where […]
In depicting character Jefferies uses what TSEliot was later to describe as an ‘Objective Correlative’. The early novels deserve re-assessment. Pre-amble In Richard Jefferies: his life and his ideals (1905), writing about the novels, HSSalt (1851-1939 campaigner for social reform, animal rights, vegetarian, socialist, and pacifist, literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist) reflects that […]
It is suggested that one result of Lockdown is that people are reading books. Wow! They haven’t been doing that? In the last three months I’ve had my habitual average read for the last 60 years – 15 quite demanding books. I have been described as a ‘chain reader’. Having completed my third or fourth […]
I’ve been pondering the idea Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, refer to as ‘Magnetic Centre’, a certain something-or-other inside us that plays some part in the development and maintenance of enhanced consciousness in human life. It sounds very elitist but in the circumstances of life as we find them, it is an objective fact that only a very few […]
THE INTRODUCTION TO MY BOOK OF FOUND HAIKU FROM RICHARD JEFFERIES SOMETHING BEYOND THE STARS MORE OR LESS AS IT APPEARED IN 1993 Something Beyond the Stars may be of interest to at least three kinds of people: Richard Jefferies enthusiasts; adherents of Zen Buddhism and haiku fanatics. Assembling it, I found myself wearing all […]
Back in the summer of 2018, I found myself offering some guidance to my grandson who, for his A Level studies, was then in the business of making a literary comparison between The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane and Edward Thomas’ The South Country. A lovely hard-back copy of the latter had been on my […]
Shakespeare Did It Since 1986 I’ve been crafting ‘Found Poems’ from texts while reading them, an active reflection on the text in front of me, a kind of creative note-making. I established this habit at a time when it used to irk me that when I was writing I wasn’t reading and when I was […]
This piece of writing, done at the end of March 1993, had been dawning on me since I was about ten when, on Friday afternoons, for a whole year we went into Mr Bullivant’s classroom to listen to him read stories which I never heard because I was too busy drinking in the painting which […]
I go into my library at 3 o’clock of a winter’s afternoon and pluck from the shelves a book I acquired a few years ago, obviously intended to be read just at this moment right now. It’s a beautiful old hardback book called Things that have Interested Me (1921) by Arnold Bennett, the ‘Five Towns’ […]
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